New Releases by James Vance Marshall

How did turtle get his shell? Why do young koalas cling to their mothers'' backs? How was the mighty Murray River created? Ten witty retellings of legends from the Yorta Yorta people to delight readers of all ages.

A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother, Peter, set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an unnamed Aboriginal boy on walkabout. He looks after the two strange white children and shows them how to find food and water in the wilderness, and yet, for all that, Mary is filled with distrust. On the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, but darker themes lie beneath. Peter’s innocent friendship with the boy met in the desert throws into relief Mary’s half-adult anxieties, and the book as a whole raises questions about what is lost—and may be saved—when different worlds meet. And in reading Marshall’s extraordinary evocations of the beautiful yet forbidding landscape of the Australian desert, perhaps the most striking presence of all in this small, perfect book, we realize that this tale—a deep yet disturbing story in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica—is also a reckoning with the mysteriously regenerative powers of death.

Mary and her brother, survivors of an aircrash in the Australian desert, face death from exhaustion and starvation. They meet an Aboriginal boy who helps them survive but the inevitable clash of cultures leads to a tragic misunderstanding.

In January 1942, in the midst of the U-boat war, the Royal Navy sends a small force on a secret mission to Antarctica. Three months later, a U-102 shells their camp; only two men and the gravely wounded captain of the squad are left alive. Their shelter gone, their supplies destroyed, cut off from contact with the outside world, they attempt to endure in the beautiful but hostile environment for the many months that must pass before rescuers can reach them.What was the secret that launched their mission? And why does the ultimate sole survivor claim both to have lost his memory and to long to return to his Antarctic purgatory?This is a paean to the natural beauty of Antarctica and a memorable story of courage, of the triumph of the human spirit, and of a transcendent love.

The account of a boy and his father in their struggles to understand each other superimposed against a sea adventure and a search for a great whale.

A story about a 40-year-old sealer named Jim who lives with his native Aleutian wife named Tania with their 6-year-old son Eric.

A brother and sister are lost in the Australian desert after an air crash and survive only with the help of an Aboriginal boy until there is a misunder-standing and they are tragically separated.